Founded in 1990 by Alan Caruba, a business and science writer, the Center is a clearinghouse for information about "scare campaigns" designed to influence public opinion and policies. Read Caruba's daily commentaries at "Warning Signs" (see favorite sites)
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Sunday, August 17, 2014

Greens are the Enemies of Energy

By Alan
Caruba

Here in America and elsewhere around
the world, Greens continue to war against any energy other than the useless
“renewable” kind, wind and solar, that is more costly and next to useless. Only
coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear keeps the modern and developing world
functioning and growing.

The most publicized aspect is Obama’s
“War on Coal” and, thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, it has been
successful; responsible for shutting down several hundred coal-fired plants by
issuing costly regulations based on the utterly false claim that carbon dioxide
emissions must be reduced to save the Earth from “global warming.”

The EPA is the government’s ultimate
enemy of energy, though the Department of the Interior and other elements of the
government participate in limiting access to our vast energy reserves and energy
use nationwide. By government edict, the incandescent light bulb has been
banned. How insane is that?

The Earth has been cooling for
seventeen years at this point, but the Greens call this a “pause.” That pause is
going to last for many more years and could even become a new ice
age.

A study commissioned by the National
Association of Manufacturers (NAM) on the impact of the proposed new EPA
regulation of emissions found that, as
CNSNews reported, it “could be the costliest federal rule by reducing the
Gross National Product by $270 billion a per year and $3.4 trillion from 2017 to
2040” adding $2.2 trillion in compliance costs for the same period. Jay Timmons,
CEO and president of NAM, said, “This regulation has the capacity to stop the
manufacturing comeback in its tracks.”

As
Thomas Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy
Research (IER), said in June, “President Obama is delivering on his promise
to send electricity prices skyrocketing.” Noting a proposed EPA regulation that
would shut more plants, he said “With this new rule, Americans can expect to pay
$200 more each year for their electricity.” Having failed to turn around the
nation’s economy halfway into his second term, Obama is adding to the economic
burdens of all Americans.

America could literally become energy
independent given its vast reserves of energy sources. In the case of coal, the
federal government owns 957 billion short tons of coal in the lower 48 States,
of which about 550 billion short tons—about 57 percent—are available in the
Powder River Basin. It is estimated to be worth $22.5 trillion to the U.S.
economy, but as the IER notes, it “remains unrealized due to government barriers
on coal production.” It would last 250 years, greater than Russia and China.
When you add in Alaska, the U.S. has enough coal to last 9,000 years at today’s
consumption rates!

In 2013 the IER estimated the worth of
the government’s oil and coal technically recoverable resources to the economy
to be $128 trillion, about eight times our national debt at the
time.

There isn’t a day that goes by that
environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club,
Greenpeace, the National Resources Defense Council, and the Union of Concerned
Scientists, along with dozens of others, do not speak out against the extracting
and use of all forms of energy, calling coal “dirty” and claiming Big Oil is the
enemy.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Greens
held off attacking the nuclear industry because it does not produce “greenhouse
gas” emissions. Mind you, these gases, primarily carbon dioxide, represent no
threat of warming and, indeed, as the main “food” of all vegetation on Earth,
more carbon dioxide would be a good thing, increasing crop yields and healthy
forests.

Events such as the 1979 partial
meltdown at Three Mile Island and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster raised
understandable fears. The Greens began opposing nuclear energy claiming that
radiation would kill millions in the event of a meltdown. This simply is not
true. Unlike France that reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, President
Carter’s decision to not allow reprocessing proved to be very detrimental,
requiring repositories for large quantities.

To this day, one of the largest, Yucca
Mountain Repository, authorized in 1987, is opposed by Greens. Even so, it was
approved in 2002 by Congress, but the funding for its development was terminated
by the Obama administration in 2011. Today there are only four new nuclear power
plants under construction and, in time, all one hundred existing plants will
likely be retired starting in the mid-2030s.

The Greens’ attack on coal is based on
claims that air quality must be protected, but today’s air quality has been
steadily improving for years and new technologies have reduced emissions without
the need to impose impossible regulatory standards. As the American Petroleum
Institute recently noted, “These standards are not justified from a health
perspective because the science is simply not showing a need to reduce ozone
levels.”

The new EPA standards are expected to
be announced in December. We better hope that the November midterm elections put
enough new candidates into Congress to reject those standards or the cost of
living in America, the capacity to produce electricity, the construction and
expansion of our manufacturing sector will all worsen, putting America on a path
to decline.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.